Hey!
That's a great post indeed. I know some of the problems they tell.
I also know about optics tolerance manufacturing problems and their costs when trying to minimize them.
But besides that, Roger Cicala (at Lens Rentals) also agree that companies should improve Quality Control.
And also says "If your assembly line is churning out 5,000 lenses a week you will need a lot of benches. Any way you slice it, the equipment and the operators to run it are going to add something to the price of the lens. I think a company being really efficient could do it for an additional $20 per prime lens, $60 per zoom. (I couldn’t break even at that cost, but I’m assuming they have economies of scale that I don’t have.) "
Who is not willing to pay a bit more for better (Reasonable) quality assurance? At least I do.
As I said, and also Roger, we don't expect perfection, error-free, or that the lens resolution is exactly as the manufacturer's MTF...
But after many L (multi-thousand dollars) lenses, having terrible missalignement problem delivering blurred zones, I really want better QC and am willing to pay an extra for it to avoid the hassle of returning the copy many times. That's when I CAN, because if I'm not in US, CA or Europe, then I will have to keep the bad lens... and that means a multi-thousand dollars risk that I do not really like...
In fact I don't live in those countries, so I have to take huge precautions and spend a huge amount of time to ensure that I'll get something near to good-copy.
As I said, most people don't understand this huge problem if they live in above mentioned countries, because they can return until they get the good copy that meets their expectations... Go away from there and you'll remember me